Re: [cowiki-dev] The new coWiki parser

> Also, as a point of note, we're not dealing with "black magic" but
> "bad magic"... we should be nothing, if not consistent when referring
> to ill defined areas of doubt and uncertainty. In my opinion, the bad
> magic bug has been fixed in CVS HEAD since late July of this year.
>  John--
>
>  I really did mean Black Magic in the sense that no one (Daniel included)
> seems to know how the parser works, or how to modify it (reliably).  I
> wasn't referrring to the data-loss bug.  I think /that/ was fixed when
> Daniel disabled Kai's auto-recover code.
>
>  Paul
>

Ahh... well, in that case, I misunderstood you.  I usually lump magic
into "real" and "psychological", and in my mind, any "real" magic is
by definition bad and dark.  The reason I noticed it was because I did
a search on cowiki dark magic and only got one message, whereas cowiki
bad magic returned many a conversation piece.  So, in this case, dark
magic refers to the parser and bad magic is the data-loss bug.

I think a few people know how the parser *works*, but reliably
modifying pretty much the only thing in the project that isn't a
plugin is in fact a major undertaking in any project. Recently, I have
been thinking that it could be possible to /move/ the parser out from
core and adding alternative parsers to the mix, choosing your parser
in the configuration.  However, once you have documents created, you
couldn't just "switch" parsers and expect all of your documents to
work as before (of course, if one parser is expected to behave exactly
the same as the other, you could expect it).  I don't want to
experiment with that until after the next release.




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